Governments must put the common social and ecological good ahead of narrow corporate interests

Less than two months ago, U.S. President Barack Obama reversed his campaign promise and opened up 800,000 square kilometres of U.S. coastal waters to offshore oil drilling, ending a 20-year U.S. moratorium on new ocean oil rig construction.

“This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” Obama stated in making the announcement. “But the bottom line is this: Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we’re going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel . . .”

Today, following a deadly explosion April 20 that killed 11 workers, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil well continues to spew life-threatening crude onto the Gulf of Mexico coastline and into the deep ocean currents that swirl toward the Florida Keys, Cuba and the east coast. As more dead marine life washes ashore, the short-sightedness of Obama’s thinking is becoming all too apparent.

With oceanographers claiming the gusher will have devastating consequences for marine life and coastal ecosystems, and local shrimp, oyster and other Gulf fisheries severely jeopardized, Obama’s comments that such drilling is needed to “sustain economic growth,” “secure jobs” and keep “businesses competitive” beg the questions: Whose economic growth? Whose jobs? Whose businesses?

For the fishermen and their families and for the tourist workers in the Florida Keys, the drill and spill approach to ocean oil and gas extraction may well eliminate their jobs, their businesses and their entire livelihoods for years to come. And expanding the areas where such drilling is allowed from the eastern Gulf of Mexico up to northern Delaware, as Obama has authorized, will only increase the risk of such horrific environmental disasters raising their oil-drenched heads in the future.

The notion of the precautionary principle, a type of “pre-emptive prudence,” has been invoked in international environmental accords and local decision-making for the past few decades. This principal calls on decision-makers to anticipate negative consequences, even when the scientific data is inconclusive, and to employ measures to prevent them.

As is becoming painfully clear, the precautionary principle was a no-show both in the decision to expand coastal drilling and in the specific case of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. At a recent U.S. federal investigation into the blowout, for example, Coast Guard Capt. Hung Nguyen, asking about the quality and installation of a blowout preventer on such rigs, learned that the defective device was “manufactured by industry, installed by industry, with no government witnessing oversight of the installation or construction.”

As the details of this spill leak out, it is becoming clear that the precautionary principal was ignored. It also appears that basic regulatory oversight was seriously compromised, suggesting a case of ecological “reckless endangerment,” one that threatens the livelihoods of thousands of American families as well as countless marine species.

In Canada, an unbowed BP Canada and other firms have been lobbying the National Energy Board to loosen regulations around drilling in the Arctic’s ecologically sensitive Beaufort Sea. While individual citizens can recycle, compost, ride bikes and use eco-friendly products, if governments do not put the common social and ecological good ahead of narrow corporate profits, our seas of life might be transformed into oceans of oil.

Present and future administrations, both in Canada and the U.S., must adopt an environmental policy of precaution rather than cleanup if we are to have lives worth living on a life-filled planet

Stephen Bede Scharper is associate professor at the Centre of Environment, University of Toronto. His column appears every fourth Monday.